EMOTIONAL MODULATION OF MEMORY BY THE HUMAN AMYGDALA

描述（由申请人提供）：情绪化的事件通常比中性的事件更容易被记住。这种现象，即情绪记忆，已经在正常受试者中进行了广泛的研究，情绪记忆的损伤是神经和精神疾病的标志，但关于其发生的神经机制知之甚少。对人类和其他动物的研究表明，情绪记忆在很大程度上依赖于杏仁核，并指出了一些具体的未解之谜。杏仁核在信息处理的哪一点上调节情绪记忆？具体来说，杏仁核在什么时间窗口发挥其对记忆的调节作用——在刺激的初始处理早期，在有关这些刺激的信息在记忆中巩固的一段时间内，甚至在检索过程中？我们的目标是通过检查60多名杏仁核受损的受试者对中性和情绪刺激的记忆，并将他们的表现与没有这种损伤的对照组进行比较，来解决这些问题。我们将在不同的编码条件下监测眼睛注视和心理生理，并在随后的不同时间点评估对刺激的记忆。我们还将通过实验直接操纵视觉刺激在编码过程中的眼球运动，以研究其对后续记忆的影响，并通过皮质醇诱导的应激源直接操纵躯体唤醒，以研究其对后续记忆的影响。此外，我们将调查自传式情绪记忆，在时间点的关系，杏仁核损伤是在生活中获得。进一步的分析将检验杏仁核损伤引起的损伤是否与海马体损伤引起的损伤可分离，杏仁核对要点和细节信息的影响是否不同，左右杏仁核对情绪记忆的贡献是否不同，以及是否存在性别差异。这些研究的发现将有助于我们理解神经和精神疾病中的情绪记忆功能障碍，可以与动物研究中关于情绪记忆基础科学的大量文献进行比较，并将通过建立杏仁核在人类情绪记忆中的因果作用来补充功能成像研究中发现的相关性。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Emotionally arousing events are often remembered better and more vividly than neutral events. This phenomenon, emotional memory, has been studied extensively in normal subjects, and impairments in emotional memory are a hallmark of neurological and psychiatric diseases, yet little is known regarding the neural mechanisms whereby it occurs. Studies in humans and other animals have shown that emotional memory depends critically on the amygdala, and point to specific unanswered questions. At what point in information processing does the amygdala modulate emotional memory? Specifically, during what window of time does the amygdala exert its modulation of memory-- early during initial processing of stimuli, throughout an extended time while information about these stimuli is consolidated in memory, or even during retrieval? We aim to address these questions by examining memory for neutral and for emotional stimuli in over 60 subjects who have damage to the amygdala, and comparing their performances to those given by controls without such damage. We will monitor eye gaze and psychophysiology during different encoding conditions, and assess memory for the stimuli at various points in time subsequently. We will also experimentally directly manipulate eye movements to visual stimuli during encoding to examine their influence on subsequent memory, and directly manipulate somatic arousal with a cortisol-inducing stressor to examine its influence on subsequent memory. Moreover, we will investigate autobiographical emotional memory, in relation to the point in time at which amygdala damage was acquired in life. Additional analyses will examine whether impairments due to amygdala damage are dissociable from those due to hippocampal damage, whether the amygdala differentially affects memory for gist and for detail information, whether left and right amygdala make different contributions to emotional memory, and whether there are gender differences. Findings from the studies will inform our understanding of emotional memory dysfunction in neurological and psychiatric disease, can be compared to a large literature on the basic science of emotional memory from studies in animals, and will complement the correlations found in functional imaging studies by establishing a causal role for the amygdala in human emotional memory.